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Bad Old Maxtor!!! Help!!!

Hi! I own a MAXTOR 2.5 GB HD. Sadly, right now, bad sectors make my system hang/freeze. I have re-FDISKed it, and re-FORMATED it. And I have used Scandisk (DOS) to make all the bad or unreliable sector. Then, I tried re-installing WINDOWS 95 OSR2, during the installation somewhere, it freezed again, so I re-formatted my HD and attempt to install win 95 again, same thing happened.

I also, tried re-formating and re-FDISK the drive, same thing still happened, tried running scandisk again and again, maked all the bad sector..... still, same thing happened.

Now, two questions:
1) how the feak in the world can I make my system to stop trying to recover the bad sectors during the formatting process.
2) What should I do to get my system up and running again.

Personally, i think you should pay a visit to http://www.dabs.com and treat yourself to a new hard drive, going by previous experiences - messing about with a hard disk in its death throes is an exercise in futility.
If thats completely out of the question, have a look at this - http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/case8.html

In my opinion, it's not worth fighting (assuming it's even fixable). Just go out and get a new hard drive. They're pretty cheap right now anyway. All hard drives are destined to fail some day. If yours is only a 2.5 gig, I would assume it's old and very used. It could last another 5 years, but it could also last another 5 minutes (assuming it's fixable right now) You would want to replace it before it dies.

Lawrence, it sounds like you need to do a low-level format. I'm not 100% sure about it, but I know this fixed bad sectors on older drives.

Your drive manufacturer should have a low level format utility for download from their site. Just make sure you get the correct one, otherwise you could irrevocably damage the drive.

Louie does have a good point though, drive space is so inexpensive now that for $100 you can get a good quality 20GB+ drive, which will give you a lot more space than what you have now.

Chris Shepherd
The Nelson-Shepherd cutoff: The point at which you realise someone is an idiot while trying to help them.
\"Well as far as the spelling, I speak fluently both your native languages. Do you even can try spell mine ?\" -- Failed Insult
Is your whole family retarded, or did they just catch it from you?

Um..

In case you haven't noticed, this older computers can't use today's HDs. The BIOS and the mainboard doesn't support huge HDs like 30 GB. I can't find a 13 GB anymore. MaxBlast and stuff like that don't work on my system! IF my systme were to support larger HD, I would thorugh it out of the window.

Um..... I also tried using the WIN setup to format the HD, but didn't work.

Lawrence...

It may be the Windows CD is bad. Test your harddrive with a different OS. Try installing Linux on it and see if it gives you any problems, (or windows from a different CD). I had a friend that had a similar problem and it turned out to be the CD, not the HD. Hope this helps. Good luck.

Happy Hacking

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Warfare is the Way of deception.
-Sun Tzu \"The Art of War\"